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Open Thread: Color Metaphors

I've been thinking today about how often we use color metaphors in speech and how a lot of them sound potentially problematic to my ears now that I'm somewhat more educated on language marginalization.

I'm wondering if there's any way to salvage these metaphors, or if that's even possible. Could we say there's no yellow-and-blue morality in this world, just shades of greenor that's the pot calling the kettle red. Is that possible? Is it doable? Is it desirable?

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Button Button
said...

The metaphor of the pot calling the kettle black harks back to the days of cooking over open flames. The black in question isn't a matter of the pot or kettle having a base black color, but of them having been discolored by soot/oxidation from hanging over the fire. As such I don't think you could substitute in a different color - you'd have to say "the pot calling the kettle dirty" or "sooty".

I'm a little unclear on why you think metaphors involving color are marginalizing though. There are 2 reasons I can think of off the top of my head:1) Use of the word black to connotate bad/evil marginalizing 'black' people by associating their skin color with badness vs white skin with goodness;2) Use of colors for metaphors marginalizing/excluding people with color vision difficulties. (Though since you offer color metaphor alternatives, I suspect you wouldn't include the blind in this category.)

For number 1, I think it's potentially a valid concern, but I'd like to hear what the people it could concern have to say about it. There is potentially a bigger faux pas in assuming that they identify with the black of 'black and white' or the black of 'pot calling the kettle black' than there is in the phrases themselves. A friend of mine likes to joke, when the topic of skin color comes up, that he would characterize himself not as black, but rather as burnt sienna! A distinction that, while made in jest, seemed appropriate to this conversation. (Disclaimer: I don't mean to imply that my friend's opinion is the opinion of even a plurality of people of African descent, of any nationality.)

I only mention number 2 because I suspect it completely slipped your mind that there are people who have difficulty with color perception. As a person with a color vision deficiency myself (one of the rare female cases), I can confidently say that switching from "Black, white, and shades of grey" to "Yellow, blue, and shades of green" would be a terrible idea if the idea was to be inclusive of the color-deficient. Depending on which cones they have trouble with, some colorblind people have difficulty distinguishing between certain shades of yellow and blue. (My trouble is with reds, so you picked the two primary colors that don't affect me for your example).

And then there are the blind, for whom color metaphors will always be marginalizing.

tl;dr since my boyfriend is harrying me to bed: I don't think there's any way to make color words not-marginalizing, so I think the best we can do is maybe to change the way we talk about people, not color.

I'm cautious about being too definite, because I have bucketloads of white privilege and it's really not my place to sign off on language that might be racially offensive ... but my first reaction was similar to Button Button's: sometimes 'black' or 'white' is an accurate comparison, and the problem is more that we were stupid enough in the first place to start calling people 'black' and 'white' instead of 'brown' and 'pink'.

Though with that as a very tentative theory, I think the best way to test it would be to look at colour metaphors in African languages. Do speakers of Shona or Yoruba or Mandinka say 'black' or 'dark' to indicate badness, and if they do, do they also distinguish between people as black and white? And does it vary a lot from language to language, or is darkness associated with night and hence threat in every language, and light with day and hence safety? I'd really like to know.

As to excluding the visually impaired ... well, it may be ableist of me, but I think that cutting out metaphors that rely on sight would be completely impractical. For most people, sight is their primary sense, and hence metaphors based on it will be numerous and immediate, and it just wouldn't happen. People would keep spontaneously coming up with sight-based metaphors and similes; I think they'd find it hard to stop themselves, not because they want to exclude blind people but because it's hard to exclude one's primary perception. Besides, if we went that route we'd have to exclude sound-based metaphors so as not to exclude deaf people, and so on. I think it'd be impolite to use a metaphor that somebody really couldn't grasp while speaking to that particular person - but on the other hand, blind and deaf people are no stupider than anyone else and doubtless get used to understanding what a word means in a metaphorical context even if they've never experienced the literal origin. I could be wrong, but if I were blind I think I might find it a bit irritating if people assumed that if they said 'The pot's calling the kettle black' I either couldn't understand what they meant or couldn't cope with working it out.

I don't know about blue and yellow, but Blue and Orange Morality is already another thing entirely, so I don't think it'll work. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality

I suppose in this one I'd have to actually see if there is racial connotations to phrases like "black and white" morality. I'm white, so I'm not the best person to talk to but it seems to me that I wouldn't associate race in there at all.

From what I understand, the reason "black" and "dark" are used as synonyms for "evil" has more to do with the instinctual fear of the dark (and the subsequent dampening of our primary sensory input) than skin color. It's entirely possible calling people "black" intentionally evokes that connotation, but then the solutions is to stop assigning evil qualities to skin colors, isn't it?

For me, when I used to berate myself in racial terms, it was never using the word "black"; instead I used to hate that my skin, hair, and eyes were "the color of mud", aka dirty and value-less. I'm not very dark-skinned, and it's just one experience, but honestly, I think of my actual color as brown and don't particularly feel kinship with the color black in metaphor.

I, too, have a nice fluffy cushion full of white privilege. But I'm a little troubled by the argument that these metaphors *shouldn't* carry racial connotations, and therefore they don't. I'm more troubled by some metaphors than others - I think the idea that Jesus "washes [you] clean, white as snow" is problematic like WHOA, for instance, but that's partly because I grew up in a tradition where some of the practitioners believed that white people were awesome, and people of color were that way because God had cursed their ancestors.

Warning: I have not thought this next paragraph through to any conclusion yet.

I also wonder if there's some dichotomy-reinforcement stuff that happens even when a metaphor isn't directly hurtful - that when we constantly use metaphors that align the normal and men and white and straightness and good and justice and logic against the abnormal and women and darkness and crookedness and evil and injustice and emotion, we reinforce the marginalization of people who are also characterized in opposition to the normal/good, even if that characterization is done elsewhere by other people. That is: is the structure and content of our idioms reinforcing racist thinking above and beyond direct connotation?

In general I don't think you can replace gray scale metaphors with color metaphors. We perceive hue as a circle. There are no extremes. Orange and blue are opposites, but they aren't opposites in the manner of black and white. Instead of being on opposite ends of a spectrum they're just two things that happen to be on the rim of a circle. Blue and Yellow aren't even opposites.

Anyway, if you head from Blue in the direction of Yellow (or Orange) changing only hue, as the example would seem to imply, you're cutting out the arc of a circle and if you continue in that direction you're going to end up right back where you started. It's like having an east and west morality, go far enough east and you'll end up to the west of where you began.

I don't think most things that compare black and white to shades of gray would do well with the idea that if went far enough in the direction of black you'd end up at white.

The spectrum from black to white is one component of color, hue is another, there is a third. It's what defines how far from black/white/gray something is. For the sake of my sanity I'm just going to say that this is saturation rather keep on looking through the 65 million color models and making sure that's the term that best describes what I'm talking about. (I should have given up when I started bumping into things with names like CIECAM02 and yet I kept going.)

Saturation could be seen as a spectrum. It doesn't loop back around. At one end you've got colorless, and the other end you've got as colorful as can be. But I'm not sure it lends itself to terminology the way "black and white" of "black and white morality" does.

As for the pot and the kettle, as the first comment points out, that's not just about color. You'd want it to apply to some kind of process. If you could think of things that would obviously have both rusted you could do, "that's the thing1 calling the thing2 rusty." Or perhaps something like, "The Statue of Liberty calling [other copper thing left outside in the elements] green."

Or you could just keep the pot and kettle but call them something like sooty, though it is about more than just soot.

I understand that the metaphor of pot/kettle was probably not originally intended to be a color slur, but it is true that language means things and there is a history in our language of using "black" to mean BOTH "bad, dirty, wrong, unclean, ugly, nasty, icky" AND certain people. (Additionally there is a history in our language of using "white" to mean BOTH "good, clean, right, nice, lovely, proper" AND certain people.)

I have seen commenters on Shakesville -- which is very big on language usage -- directly request Melissa to not use "dark" as synonymous with "evil/bad" and she has agreed with their request. Her belief, if I understand it correctly, is that it matters not where a word use originally came from, but rather where it is now. So, for instance, even if X ableist/sexist/racist term was originally totally clinical and not at all intended as bad, if it's been used to harm people to the point that its use in Y contexts is a trigger, we should consider adapting to that out of respect for the triggered. (Whether it stems at least in part from a fear of the night, I don't know, but I do not recall many people using "bright" -- that is, what the sun is right before it dehydrates you fully and kills you -- to mean evil.)

To bring it out of color awareness, a comparable example could be a person saying "Life's a bitch". They may well mean a female dog, but that doesn't mean that word isn't very hard for some people to have to hear on a regular basis, and a lot of the feminist community tries hard to use alternative words. And, of course, another part of the feminist community uses it a lot as a reclamation effort. But with many color metaphors that would not be very possible -- with "black and white morality", we mean that the world is not "all evil" or "all good" and we have very strong connotations in place on Black/Evil and White/Good.

(Interestingly, this game is the only piece of fiction I've ever been exposed to that consciously switched everything so that Dark was Good and Light was Bad. It's about a "comet's light" coming to kill everyone on earth. The switch of the metaphors GREATLY confused me as a child, but I'm glad they did so because I've yet to see anything like it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_Gaia )

Do speakers of Shona or Yoruba or Mandinka say 'black' or 'dark' to indicate badness, and if they do, do they also distinguish between people as black and white?

It's a good question. But racial preference for "light" skin isn't limited to white people, so a foreign language analysis might do no more than unearth similar prejudices in other cultures. But it would be worth knowing.

Of course, then it still comes back to "ok, but intent (and origin) is not magic and it hurts some people now, so...?" I don't have an answer for that. I rather think I might try modifying my language anyway. I like the idea of red pots and kettles -- most of ours are blue. But I've no idea if this impulse is helpful or useful. Possibly that will be a question that will depend on each audience member. :/

(And, yes, I knew of blue and orange morality. Great trope, one of my favorites. :))

I also wonder if there's some dichotomy-reinforcement stuff that happens even when a metaphor isn't directly hurtful - that when we constantly use metaphors that align the normal and men and white and straightness and good and justice and logic against the abnormal and women and darkness and crookedness and evil and injustice and emotion, we reinforce the marginalization of people who are also characterized in opposition to the normal/good, even if that characterization is done elsewhere by other people. That is: is the structure and content of our idioms reinforcing racist thinking above and beyond direct connotation?

Yes! That was where my thinking is/was. Thank you, Dav. Much more eloquent and clearly put. :)

What about ultraviolet vs. infrared as a color metaphor? That is, the extremes of morality are things we don't experience.* Everything we experience is not just an intermediate wavelength, but also something we experience as multidimensional - things not only have color, but also, as Chris points out, saturation and brightness, brilliance and softness, and we also experience color-related properties like sheen or dullness that aren't really related to the color itself, but to other light qualities.

* With our eyes, anyway. The metaphor breaks down if you start adding other instruments. Or if you do want a true absolute moral continuum, because ultramarine isn't intrinsically better/worse than tangerine. But it at least solves the completely circular problem Chris articulates with the classic color wheel.

So I just wrote a little over a page and then realized that I actually was saying very little. I'll try to write an amount that better reflects the actual content.

It's simple enough to make black good and white bad. You can just use what the characters are wearing if you want. (Consider Luke Skywalker and Stormtroopers, now imagine a movie that is just Skywalker vs. the Stormtroopers with no black-wearing villains to confuse the matter.) It is likewise simple to make light bad (consider things like Ana's example of the comet's light bringing destruction or imagine monsters that couldn't leave the light, or think about how in Left Behind the God of light made it so anyone who stepped into sunlight would be scorched into painful death as though they were a vampire, and so on.)

Where I think it is more difficult is to make dark good. Since we're dealing with visual metaphors I'm guessing we'd be dealing with sighted characters. Drop them into the dark, give them a working flashlight, and try to convince them that the flashlight is evil and the darkness is good. I think it's going to be very difficult. Human sight is ill suited to darkness.

Even the previously mentioned thing about what the characters are wearing breaks down in the dark, because color vision only works in light, once it starts to get dark color fades to nothing. (Something about rods and cones and stuff.) So if you wanted to symbolize that dark is good by having the good people wear dark colors you'd have to put them in light rather than darkness to let the colors be seen. Otherwise you don't know if that's black or brown or blue or orange.

Darkness equals good seems problematic for a work with sighted characters. And I say this as someone who would generally prefer things be darker and shuns the light where possible. (If I step outside on a snowy day without my sunglasses it hurts, even with sunglasses it's often uncomfortably bright.)

I can see dim being good. Moonlight, for example, is comparatively dim, but it isn't dark. I think you could have something where the moonlight was good and electric light was bad. You could even use some of the standard darkness things because the good moonlight people would end up blinded by the much brighter electric light and so would be at a disadvantage. (The person holding the flashlight could see whatever they want, the person the flashlight is shined at can only see what the flashlight holder points the flashlight at until they've been away from the flashlight long enough for their eyes to readjust.)

I think the simplest Good-Dark that I can come up with is that the darkness connotes privacy. It's great for dystopia, a world where your every move is watched during the day out in public, and the only place you can truly have your freedom is alone in the night. It's just as easy to use this to say that criminals and bad people lurk in the darkness, but it's not like it's hard to put an innocent fugitive in instead.

The book "Darkborn" got around the "but you can't see in the dark" with a race of people who saw with sonar. Descriptions were shapes and sounds and smells. Very nicely done, but obviously very specialized.

An interesting problem, though. In the interim, I would like my color-swapped Star Wars, though. That would be awesome. :)

Ultraviolet of Infrared would obviously solve what I was talking about as it is a completely linear way to do color (but it slices all of the non-violet shades of purple out of the thingy and that's sad) though it makes one wonder which is good and which is bad. One could assume ultra is good while infra is bad, I suppose.

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Ana, remember the error someone said they were getting with bold italics? I got it in your post, it went away on refresh but I grabbed a picture first, so if you'd like I can send that your way. It is rather strange, several characters have been replaced with little question marks in boxes, a repeated symbol I'm not familiar with, some capital letters with diacritics. An L with an accent, multiple Ns with accents, even more Us with short marks, and scattered lowercase letters. All of it is still bold and italic.

I do remember that error! Are you using Chrome, by any chance? Google led me to believe it was an error with the way Chrome is caching fonts (which is why Refresh fixes it). I was hoping they'd patch that soon. :(

Ladyhawke is color-swapped. The heroic exiled knight wears black armor, and the evil bishop who exiled him, and also put a curse on him and his girlfriend, wears white.

It's funny, I was just thinking about this same topic last night while browsing the forums for The Secret World - the game itself is set in the modern world, and therefore has a great deal of diversity in its secret societies, but it does kinda lean towards evil=dark. One particular forum thread had someone repeatedly referring to "darkest, blackest, evil" in an attempt to explain how all the secret societies are morally questionable, but nowhere near as bad as the Evil Forces that they fight.

Also, I don't know anything that makes things look ROT13 weird. Maybe if all of the text was converted to the Voynich* manuscript font.

I actually want to someday make a game set in an online world where the Cthulluesque cult speaks entirely in ROT13. Everything will be perfectly normal English, perhaps Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe for ceremonies, but generally just English, but it will be put though ROT13. So you'd have the voice actors actually saying, to the best of their ability, things like "Tbq bs Yvtug, pbzr sbegu naq qribhe gur haoryvriref."

This would probably take some practice.

And the subtitle would be the ROT13ed text. The player would have no idea what they were saying. Perhaps as a skill you could learn the language and the subtitles would gradually contain more and more non-ROT13 English.

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*Which I have somehow learned to spell correctly on the first try. I am amazed at the basic knowledge I have today. Maybe someday I'll be able to spell Massachusetts on the first try. Not today though. Thank you built in spell checker.

The dwarfs of Discworld, dwelling as fantasy dwarfs usually do underground, consider light blinding and negative rather than illuminating and good. Their creation myth states that humans are enlightened because they never found the Laws, and the dwarfs were endarkened because they did. They're also ruled by the Low King.

For the tropers in the audience, The Sacred Darkness is relevant to the discussion, although the examples tend more towards "light and dark are both good things that should maintain a balance" than "dark is good and light is bad."

When I think fantasy dwarfs living underground, I think torches and thus light. Darkness is reserved for caverns they have yet to domesticate or, worse, places where they've been wiped out. (In Lord of the Rings you know the dwarves of Moria must all be dead because it's dark instead of light.) Dwarfs are the bringers of light into the underground, not light on the level of sunlight, but enough light that it isn't dark and you can see quite well by the flickering of frequent fires in the forms of torches. Where it is dark there are no dwarfs. (Or they're sleeping, even masters of light such as dwarfs still sleep in darkness.)

Apparently that isn't true of the dwarfs of Diskword. How do they see? Or do they not see? Do they use sonar?

I often feel like I'm the only person on earth who has not read any Diskworld stuff.

Also I apparently want it to be "Dwarves" since every time I type the word that's how it comes out.

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Sighted underground dwellers in general I think I associate with light*. On the surface I can believe that people need never make light. They can live by the light of the sun and, depending on the phase, the moon. Light can be something that's entirely apart from yourself. It is taken care of by forces you never need dwell on.

But underground, in places where the sunlight never goes, you have to have a very intimate relationship with your light because otherwise you'll never see. (Unless it naturally glows, as with the bug things in Pitch Black and various things in real life.) You have to make light, tend light, you have to think light. You have to pay careful attention to light because if you don't you will have no light.

I'd expect any sighted person in a place of darkness to have much more appreciation of light than those who live in a place that is bathed in sunlight half the time.

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* A possible exception being ones who see heat. For anything that can be seen there must be a light source, but something like heat vision doesn't require the person doing the seeing to cultivate the source. The source just is. So all of the stuff about necessity of paying attention to light goes away. On the other hand, for something warm blooded if you can see heat then light means life and darkness means death. If you see your friend being dark, your friend is no longer with you. One wonders what connotations light would have in that case.

Y'know, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." If one is looking for specific patterns, it's possible to see them when they aren't really there--when it's really just random noise, or something else entirely.

'Pot calling the kettle black' is about iron cookware--it's nice and black when it's well-cured. 'Black' is GOOD in iron pots and pans. It's not a racial metaphor, and changing the color would make the writer sound profoundly ignorant of idiomatic English.

'Black and white and shades of gray' is about *contrast*. Something that is black or white is clearly one thing or another (and it may also refer to the clarity of lawbooks [black & white print] vs. custom & practice); something that is 'shades of gray' is a mix. It is a metaphor frequently applied to ethics, morality, or law, fields where people wish things were perfectly clear when it really is more complicated than that. Sticking random colors in the metaphor would make no sense. Again, not a racial metaphor.

(Whether it stems at least in part from a fear of the night, I don't know, but I do not recall many people using "bright" -- that is, what the sun is right before it dehydrates you fully and kills you -- to mean evil. Since I live in a desert, I would think people from desert cultures would have different connotations -- the night is cool and keeps you safe -- and yet we frequently do not.)

Anyway, there are two examples I can think of where light/dark, good/evil metaphors are changed around: one historical, the other fictional.

To the ancient Egyptians, BLACK was the color of fertile, well-watered land and represented fertility and life. RED was the color of the desert, and represented evil. Nut, the sky goddess, was almost always depicted as the night sky, and was the mother of most of creation and generally benign. Ra, and the various other solar gods were considered very two-sided: the sun made their crops grow and gave light (Ra in his aspects), but it also brought drought, pestilence, heat stroke, and fun stuff like that (Sekhmet, the 'Eye of Ra' aspect).

Second note: I occasionally play an old RPG called Runequest, which had a unique campaign world called Glorantha. It's too complex to describe in one paragraph, but one of the Elder races that you could play were the trolls, the "men of darkness", who were a matriarchial society of powerful nocturnal hominids. They were actually the best described non-human race, and a lot of players were fond of them (Elves were plants, and not very appealing to me for that reason, and Dwarves were creepy hive-mind communists, the Dragonnewts got turned into NPCs in 3rd edition, and the other races didn't have much material for them.)

The trolls' primary sense was sonar, and they were originally native to Glorantha's underworld which was a dark quiet place before some obnoxious sky god killed the sun god and inflicted him on the underworld, causing the trolls to leave for the surface world back in mythic time. Trolls do not like the sun--it's bright, hot, gives them sunburn and reveals them to their enemies. Trolls like the cool night, and dark places and cold climates. Dark is good, Sun is evil for them. Their most dangerous, evil war god is the one that uses fire magic. Trolls are not intrinsically good or evil; they're just people. A barbaric, violent people, but so is almost everyone else on Glorantha, which is a world where good and evil are in the eye of the beholder's culture (except for Chaos, mostly). (The sun worshippers consider trolls evil incarnate; storm worshippers consider them dangerous, often enemies, but not evil, for example.)

It's not a racial metaphor, and changing the color would make the writer sound profoundly ignorant of idiomatic English.

I really hope this doesn't sound too touchy, but I suggested doing just this, and I also have a degree in English literature (which really should have been called a degree in English grammar, based on the classes I took and the structure of same), so... I would like to tentatively suggest that since one can make the suggestion without being "profoundly ignorant of idiomatic English" -- and I know this is possible because I just did this thing -- I would suggest that the sounding "profoundly ignorant of idiomatic English" may be a problem on the part of the listener, not the speaker. :/

Er. I hope that makes sense. My point is that people can suggest things for reasons other than being ignorant of the original use of a term. See, for example, pretty much every "ableist" slur whatsoever. Most of them started out as medical diagnoses, but have been abused to the point of meaning something else entirely and additionally being triggering. Saying that something wasn't originally problematic does not mean that we should use it now without reflection. I believe that to be a position of profound privilege.

I'm not sure if the dwarf sight thing was ever addressed. They can see, and they can function just fine aboveground in the daylight, but I can't remember if they have heat vision or just a whole lot of rods (or possibly cones, whichever you use for night vision).

I'm pretty sure dwarves is an acceptable pluralization, but the Firefox spellcheck doesn't agree with me.

I think that part of the problem I have with something like endarkened is that you can't shed dark on the matter. It would be seven kinds of awesome if you could*. Since you can't that means that darkness is everywhere. It gives no definition to what you look at, it gives no way to distinguish.

Darkness is everywhere and it's everywhere equally unless someone shines light into part of it. Now there's almost never total darkness, so there's almost always some light being shone even in the darkest darks you're likely to experience. So certainly there is variation in darkness, but since the darkness is all encompassing where the light is specific, the variation that most lends itself to being seen is always where the light is. It's the variation between light and dark or light and other light that gives you information, but never dark and dark. You always need the light.

Things that can see in the dark don't see using dark, they just have eyes that pick up more light or different light so that it isn't dark for them.

If you could [opposite of shine] dark then that would change, maybe you'd be looking at something that was all equally well lit and lacking in nice texture and generally hard to distinguish (white on white can do this) so you pulled out your flashdark and darked down some of it, casting anti-shadows and generally giving you more information than you had before, then I could see being endarkened being what we mean by enlightened.

That that requires light to be the norm and dark to be the exception that draws contrast.

Completely random thing:If we posit the idea of a dark light that when shed on something makes it darker, then what happens when it's pointed at something that has no ordinary light on it to being with? If there is no light to cancel out (or simply less light than dark light) do you end up with something darker than black?

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* When I was younger and creating Star War Mary Sues in the sort of oral group composition that young teenagers do, my character was going to have two lightsabers, a white one that lit up the area around it, and a black one that that made things darker. Mostly this was for reasons of awesomeness, but there was also an assumption that it would be disorienting for those being fought and possibly give them a headache. But not my character because. "Because what?" you ask? Just because.

You can shed shadow. Wouldn't that be shedding dark? And if light was painful to your eyes and dark was soothing, the shedding of dark would aid concentration and thought.

I have thought about this a lot lately. I have light-sensitive eyes and a bulb has mercifully blown out in my work area. I have begged my boss to leave it be -- and as it turns out, two other people in our area are light sensitive, too. I think they're going to not replace the bulb.

Maybe once the flashdark's removed all the light from an object, the leftover dark starts cancelling out other forms of energy? It'd probably start with ultraviolet and infrared light that's closest to the visible spectrum,* and since to my limited understanding infrared lets you see heat, it might actually make the object colder.

*Does this mean it would cancel green light before red or purple? I do believe it does.

Also, "shedding light" does not usually mean the brightest burn your eyes out light. So I don't think "shedding dark" would need to be the total ultimate can't see even a little bit dark.

I don't think it would either. I figured I'd say that up front because it's kind of important for my description of a flashdark. I figure that a flashdark would make things darker to the same extent a flashlight makes them lighter.

You can shed shadow. Wouldn't that be shedding dark?

To a certain extent, but it's undirected to the point that I think it's easier to think of it is a changing the way in which light is shed.

When I shed light on something that tends to involve a lot of control on my part on what I'm doing by having control over the light source. When I cast a shadow I have a lot less say in the matter. Instead the local light sources determine much of what is going on.

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I too often wish places would be darker because my eyes are more sensitive to light than most, but in such cases darker is still light.

If we really want to talk about the unfair treatment of dark and light, and important notion is probably the fact that light grabbed all of the good territory for itself. Blinding searing light in which you can't see and are in pain: That's light. Twilight: That's light too. (I'm not referring to the book.) Moonlight: Definitely light. That's a massive span. Dark got shoved way off to the side.

Though twilight actually means half-light so we could consider it half dark, half light, but that still leaves dark on the crappy side of the dividing line.

I think the reason light has more territory than dark is that light is a thing, and dark is the absence of that thing, rather than a thing in itself, and something dark can't absorb light the way something cold can absorb heat. So light gets all the good real estate because it can always beat dark in a fistfight.

oh! I remembered a book, Black and White by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kitteredge...it was a superhero society, empowered heroes go to training school, get sponsorships, and the main two characters were a blonde, dark-powered hero called Jet, and a black-haired, light-powered antihero/villain called Irridium. A lot of the story is about flip-flopping the usual associations along with the status quo. I got the book at comiccon and couldn't put it down until I finished.

Why would the pot call the kettle red? If you're getting into a world where the pots are red, you've left the classics behind and it could just as easily be a purple or yellow pot. To be certain the pot and the kettle are both red, they should ideally come from the same set, which changes the saying from noting hypocrisy to pointing out one 'sibling' picking on another.

Changing the colours in our sayings seems nonviable to me. It just gets into all kinds of silly complications that distort the meanings of the phrases. I can vaguely handle 'space metaphors'* in fiction. I don't want to see them in the real world.

* You know the ones. The reminders that ooh, we're in space now. Which, especially when half-assed, are just painful. "Logic suggests that if a hypothetical, metaphorical creature moves in the fashion of a Vulcan Spaceduck, and is suited to environments that suit a Vulcan Spaceduck, and utters auditory contributions that are consistent with a Vulcan Spaceduck, then it may be possible to assume, unless contradictory evidence presents itself, that it is a Vulcan Spaceduck, or some creature of extremely close similarity to a Vulcan Spaceduck."

Why would the pot call the kettle red? If you're getting into a world where the pots are red, you've left the classics behind and it could just as easily be a purple or yellow pot. To be certain the pot and the kettle are both red, they should ideally come from the same set, which changes the saying from noting hypocrisy to pointing out one 'sibling' picking on another.

Because the red pots/kettles are invariably crappy. The paint dolls them up so that people buy them, but they skimp on the proper no stick, and they end up being the pots you only use when the good ones are in the wash.

As far as Discworld goes, I really only like the books about the Watch. And those I quite like. Everything else I've tried has been meh.

(That's not to say that the Discworld books are unproblematic, though. Like most of the things I like, I have to turn off my "that's sexist!" detectors, or I'd be flinging the books against the wall. ... And perhaps that's why I identify marginally more as a guy - most of the fiction I like is better enjoyed as one. Not that men don't notice sexism, of course, but it's less painful when you're the privileged party.)

Because the red pots/kettles are invariably crappy. The paint dolls them up so that people buy them, but they skimp on the proper no stick, and they end up being the pots you only use when the good ones are in the wash.

Unlike the super expensive cast iron cookware, which is often coated in a tinted ceramic. One day I *will* own a Le Creuset French oven.

I actually like my oxidized cookware. It's not dirty or bad, it's just been used. (I'm guessing there are people who manage to both use their cookware and keep it pristine, but they're not anyone I know.) Eventually my cookie sheets do get replaced, but every other pot and pan develops a patina.

Well, I think a point that should be made is that it was not my intention to say that everyone *should* abandon color metaphors. I think I said that they might be worth examining and rethinking.

I do very much understand your concerns about the erosion of language to jerks. However, as I've learned from various safe spaces -- including Shakesville -- considerate speaking is not a matter of letting the jerks "have" words, but a matter of acknowledging that our communities are frequented by marginalized people who have been marginalized by the use of language. Considerate speaking is therefore a matter of trying to ensure that we do not -- from our various places of privilege -- continue that marginalization.

I expect we have all been in That Discussion with That Guy who insists that an ableist slur or a homophobic slur or a sexist slur is TOTALLY VALID because it originally came from a medical definition. And we ourselves already self-censor in a number of ways to (1) protect people and (2) express ourselves clearly.

For instance, it would be inappropriate for many reasons for someone to respond to this post by saying I am being "hysterical" because that term has historically been used to dismiss and marginalize women. If Dictionary Dan were to keep insisting that the word *only* means "unmanageable emotional excesses" and that he isn't going to give up a perfectly valid medical term just because jerks have misused it, that argument would not, imho, be valid.

Anyway, when I posed the question, I had hoped for a discussion and this has been a lovely one, thank you all. I think -- regardless of which side we decide to 'err' on ('too', or 'not enough') -- that keeping these things in mind as a way of questioning the evolution of our language and how prejudices feed into that is important. (Where was that Slacktivist thread where we were trying to find a male version of shrill/nag? Did anyone ever come up with one?)

I haven't read any of those Discworld books. The female characters in the books I have read have made me reluctant to try any with female leads. Though I did read Hogfather, which half does. The biggest problem with that one was the ending, which kind of ruined it for me, but I don't think lying to kids about Santa Claus does anything good.

Actually, I'm rather fond of Angua von Uberwald and Cheery Littlebottom too, but they aren't main characters. The witches are better developed (and Tiffany is wonderful). Try Maskerade for a book where all the main characters are female.

It's an interesting tension being a neo-Platonist (whatever the scientific thinking may be, it is to Platonic philosophy that we owe the understanding that Darkness in a metaphorical / spiritual / moral / etc. sense is the progressive ABSENCE of Light) and being fundamentally, constitutionally drawn to a chthonic spirituality.

That being said, I automatically assume that light / white / bright is harsh, dangerous, uncompromising, and possibly evil; while dark / black / dim is comforting, safe, flexible, and on the side of good*.

This makes reading the Johannine scriptures and derived spiritual texts an ... unsettling experience. But in a good way -- because it constantly forces me to examine my assumptions and biases and think about what they mean and where they lead me.

*This plays out in shallower ways, as well; it's a running joke with hapaxdaughter that my ideal romantic hero is "short, dark, and psychotic" [somewhat problematic when hapaxspouse is tall, Nordic, and almost aggressively sane] and I have to force myself to write a protagonist with fair coloring and conventional good looks. And no, that's not author-insertion; there's a reason my grandfather's nickname for me was "Dutchie."

I decided, for my own self, that I would avoid 'dark = bad' language, and have found that wherever I'd have otherwise said 'dark', and can substitute 'grim' for even better effect anyway. I don't mind 'black and white' as a summary of a moral view because it doesn't in itself state that one is good and the other is bad - just that they are extremely dissimilar. (It's also possible to read it in an 'objective fact' style, like calling the newspaper the 'black and white'. Unless someone makes it clear that 'black and white morality' is 'evil and good', I kind of read it as a morality of 'some things are TRUE and others are NOT and there is no DEBATE', which I think equally conveys simplisticness and trouble.)

To totally spoilerify some of my own writing, I like light and dark as elemental things, but not as moral things - but I don't always like my characters to know this. So while a portion of the cast may spend the book terrified because Shadow is growing in power and there might not be enough Light to fight it off, they find in the end that Shadow is actually just different* (if somewhat scary**) and the real problem has been started by someone with Light.

*Light is order and discipline and clarity, all good things and what might be called hallmarks of civilisation. Darkness is more basic, and include the most primal things, which the villain points out includes fear and hatred, but which a hero points out also includes love and truth and empathy. The facets of Light are what we focus on a lot of the time, but that's because we need the aspects of Dark like we need water.

**It also lets you read minds, basically.

---

Discworld!

The books are definitely problematic in the sense of 'this man has not and is not likely ever to fully internalise feminism', but it does appear (from my position as a reasonably well-informed dude) that he's trying pretty hard most of the time and gets a lot right, especially when women are the main characters instead of the secondaries. I love Angua in concept, but on the page, she has a lot of scenes that make me cringe due to her canine instincts confusing her mental concepts of 'boyfriend' and 'master'. It helps that said boyfriend is incapable of seeing himself as anyone's rightful master, but still - argh. Angua's incredible competence as a police sergeant is largely informed, while her on-page actions are often And Now, A Woman Will Think Womanny Thoughts. The witches do not have this problem, that I ever recall. (Tiffany spends a fair bit of time thinking about boys, but never to distraction, and: she is a teenager, I understand we allow this sort of thing.)

---

For random comparison, I saw the Tintin movie today, and in addition to accurately predicting after about 20 minutes that this movie would not pass Bechdel-Wallace, I also concluded that the best synopsis would be something like "Drunk white men ruin everything trying to get rich", which sounds less like a synopsis and more like a painfully pragmatic proverb.

Oh, I should say I don't dislike the women of the Watch books. I do like Angua and Cheery. But... and here's where it gets complicated. I think there's something a little problematic about Angua and Carrot's relationship, though, at the moment I'm not sure I could tell you just what. Maybe that she's more dependent on him than he is on her? It somehow isn't equal. I vastly prefer equal relationships. (Vimes and Sybil have a more equal relationship, despite doing entirely different things with their lives.) And, while it's amusing that female liberation for dwarves is embracing the standard trappings of femininity, that's problematic, too, because out here in the real world, skirts and makeup and whatnot are still being pushed at women as "what women should do." It's one of those things that's much more amusing if you're a guy than if you're a woman and faced with the actual pressure of being a woman properly. Or so it strikes me, anyway. (What people who identify strongly as women think is probably more important than what I think.)

Being a feminist must be so much less complicated if you're a man or a woman. *sigh*

I like the dwarf feminism movement, since it explicitly targets the older anti-'feminine' forms of female advancement - paraphrasing slightly, Cheery says outright that in dwarf culture 'You can be whatever sex you like as long as you're a man'. It does have the problem of embracing 'feminine' trappings as the only real way to be female, but it also pushes back very hard at the idea that women are lesser if they embrace those feminine trappings because they like to, or that women should just be happy to be equal by virtue of being honorary men, and in some parts of culture I think that's actually the tougher hurdle. Among fantasy fiction in particular, the genre whose coat of arms probably includes the Spunky Princess Rejecting Pink Dresses Rampant, there's a whole lot of female characters who are implied to be good because they Act Like Men.

I could be totally off-base here, but I get the impression sometimes that sexism in the UK is a little more likely to be the type wherein men and women are equal on paper but are fundamentally different creatures (beyond dimorphism), and sexism in North America is a little more likely to be of the type that men and women may not be so different but men are simply more important. (Both varieties exist in both places, of course.)

Oh, no, Americans are quite convinced that men and women are inherently different (and not just because one keeps their genitals on the outside). They're not equal and not the same species. Whee.

There's several problems here, though. One is that Cheery's statement that dwarves can be whatever sex, as long as they're men doesn't actually map onto feminism as well as it might be intended to. It's not clear that dwarves want to acknowledge the existence of women. (Though they must in order to make little dwarves. Or perhaps dwarves are actually hermaphrodites.) Dwarves don't expect both sexes to act like men, they don't want there to be two sexes. And that's bloody well not what women being free to wear pants is all about. Feminism is not - and to the best of my knowledge has never been - about being honorary men. It's about not having to fit in the tiny little box labeled "proper woman". (And, for that matter, about men not having to fit in the tiny little box labeled "proper man.")

Our culture (American, maybe not British) still thinks that the only way to be a woman is to be feminine. I'm female bodied, but I can't tell you how many times I've been told I'm going into the wrong restroom or have frightened little old ladies because I don't look "like a woman."* I also feel like pointing out that some "feminine" things haven't always been - jewelry and frilly clothing included. We - culturally - put down whatever we've deemed "for women" because we've deemed women to be lesser.

And...here it gets a bit complicated, but an unfortunate amount of feminine attire is confining, uncomfortable, and fragile. Feminine shoes hurt the feet. Other than sports bras, bras are, um, well, imagine wearing a jock strap all the time. Feminine shirts have sleeves that are too short, so you can't extend your arms all the way. They're also often cut too short, so that they untuck if you do raise your arms too high. Skirts require one to police one's movements lest you flash people. And so on and so forth. And, yes, this is coming from someone for whom women's clothes are drag. Maybe real women don't have these problems.

I've also got to say that for all that Spunky Princess Rejects Dresses and is lauded for Acting Like A Man is a cliche, I can't think of a single example. You brought them up, so I hope you can. There are definitely fantasy novels in which women do "male" jobs, but we've decided adventuring itself is a male job, so what do you expect? (Not that a fantasy novel about the day to day life of non-adventurers couldn't be interesting, mind. But most fantasy is fantasy adventure.) Hell, I can barely think of any female fantasy characters I identify with at all. They're mostly very busy being very female. (To me, anyway.)

I don't know. This is complicated. It's late and I'm tired. And it all hits a little close to home, since I've never been clear on whether I just am both/neither instead of female or whether I don't identify as female because I don't identify with much of femininity. And if you're not feminine, you're not a woman. (Though I've wanted to be both/neither for as long as I can remember. And identified primarily with male fictional characters for as long as I can remember. And I am now officially off topic.)

*Yes, I realize the fact that my gender identity is both/neither/other/confused does not exactly help my case here, since you can easily make the argument that I'm not a real woman. But simply having short hair and wearing men's shirts should not be enough to bring on the bathroom police. And as long as it is, there's a huge problem with promoting performing femininity as the only way to be female.

Other than sports bras, bras are, um, well, imagine wearing a jock strap all the time.

I have to say my experience of bras is different. I don't know what cup size you are, but I have pretty big boobs. Going without a bra, if I'm up and around, is much less comfortable than having one. Obviously some bras are more comfortable than others, but I personally wouldn't say that all non-sports bras are uncomfortable.

Regarding Pratchett's treatment of dwarves ... I think that cultural context may be relevant here. The idea that dwarves all insist on everyone acting male comes, I think, from Feet of Clay, which was first published in 1996.

In 90s Britain, the 'New Lad' culture was riding high.* The fashion was for men to drink a lot and act boorishly under the fig-leaf of claiming that it was 'ironic'. The female roles offered by New Laddism were sex object (the Spice Girls claiming it's empowering to jump around in your scanties) or 'ladette', a girl who drinks as hard as the boys and does the things they like to do and laughs at sexist jokes.

In other words, saying 'You can be any sex you want ... as long as you act male' was an observation almost certainly made in response to the popular culture of the moment. I think Angua says something like, 'There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads' - and that expresses a big problem that lad culture gave women. If everyone was equal, but only as long as they acted like lads, it removed women's right to point out that lad culture was sexist and often threatening from a female point of view. Say that, and you'd be accused of having no sense of humour, because lad culture rested on the assumption that male was the default and that if it didn't bother a man, it wasn't worth bothering about.

I was in my teens and twenties when lad culture was at its height, and it was a truly dispiriting fashion.

Pratchett's a writer very sensitive to pop culture and quick to respond to trends. I think his take on dwarves is probably best understood as a response to New Lad culture rather than to culture in general.

I have to say my experience of bras is different. I don't know what cup size you are, but I have pretty big boobs. Going without a bra, if I'm up and around, is much less comfortable than having one. Obviously some bras are more comfortable than others, but I personally wouldn't say that all non-sports bras are uncomfortable.

Seconding this, and adding that if a given bra is uncomfortable, it's probably a sign that said bra doesn't fit right. Very few people make sports bras in my size, so I don't in fact own any sports bras. I still own a lot of very comfortable bras, because I make sure to get the right fit before I buy one. In fact I've never understood the association of feminism with bra-burning: if I didn't wear a bra I'd be in a lot of discomfort any time I wanted to climb a set of stairs or move at anything beyond a walking pace; how is it empowering to reject something that saves women pain and allows them greater freedom of movement?

Bras that should fit me... don't. I hate the things. Especially underwire bras. Underwire bras, within five minutes of putting them on, make me squirm and fret and desperately long to wrench out my own ribs just to make the intense aggravation and discomfort stop.Even a good number of non-underwire bras, in my size, having been tried on and checked to be sure they fit... proceed to very much annoy me. The tightness around my ribs is just... yuck. (And if they were any looser, they'd slide up and down my ribcage like a lingerie xylophone act, so it's no use telling me I just need looser bras.)I've a midsize kinda chest, on a small frame... and I have tried. I've tried looser, I've tried tighter, I've tried getting fitting assistance from bra shop assistants... none of it helps me. Aside from some of my older bras, the best I can hope for is 'something I can tolerate when I wear it.'Besides, the straps slide off my shoulders. Yes, I've tried tightening them. Then they dig into my shoulders, and still slide off, only now when they do they restrict my movements even more when they do. (Bra straps making it hard to lift your arms freely? Very bad, when driving.) So I go looser, so they don't cut into my shoulders or make it too hard to move. But still very annoying.

Feminism is not - and to the best of my knowledge has never been - about being honorary men.

Somewhere in this conversation, I think wires have crossed. The 'honorary men' idea is the basic cultural expectation of dwarf culture, which dwarf feminism opposes.

And as long as it is, there's a huge problem with promoting performing femininity as the only way to be female.

The dwarf feminism movement doesn't attack dwarf women for not wearing dresses - though it also doesn't explicitly say that they shouldn't have to if they don't want to, which would be better if it were explicit.

I'm not trying to say that your feelings are invalid, because they're not and it is a big problem and gender confuses the @#$% out of me even though I'm pretty clearly a cis dude. I just don't see how the Discworld presentation is actively exclusionary.

In terms of anti-feminine female characters, I tend to stay away from the books that feature them, but we've got Aravis coming up in Narnia, there's Arya in Song of Ice and Fire, and the Wheel of Time series appears to have several. It may be more popular in unpublished works and fanfiction, which is not representative of the state of the industry but, I would think, is an indication of the state of the readership.

I've got a big post about gender coming up on my blog; this discussion has stoked further thoughts on the matter, so for all I know I'll have reconsidered and completely changed my mind by the time it goes up.

In my experience* what Will, and later Kit, discussed does exist in the United States. I think it is significantly less so now than it was earlier. At one point professional women here wore shoulder pads to give their silhouette a more masculine appearance, I'm pretty sure that's not remotely common place anymore. The message of that was simple though, "Want to succeed in business? Look like a man." The same can be said of how women were expected to act. Based on some articles that I occasionally bump into I get the impression that the latter may still be true some extent or another but, again, no personal experience.

The result was that in the workplace a woman would have to be a proper man, except probably expected to do it better than the men did because the men, being men, are expected to be men and thus aren't constantly being judged on it. Outside of the workplace and workplace related things (like say meeting with coworkers) a woman was expected to be a proper woman. Those two things didn't mix very well, as you might expect.

Anyway, women weren't expected to be men all the time, but if they wanted to work outside of traditionally female areas they were definitely expected to be men then.

And this is entirely aside from the assumption we've talked about elsewhere that if you're doing something the dominant culture tells you to do you're just doing it because you're a mindless drone and not because you might actually like it. That assumption means that people who are being feminine, or masculine for that matter, are sometimes attacked for doing that because, damn it, they're fucking colluders and they don't really want that they're just under the influence of the patriarchy and don't know what they really want. Or something like that.

None of which is about being free not to wear skirts. It's more or less the opposite. It's still taking choice away just in a more complicated way (a way that means that no matter what you do you're wrong in at least, off the top of my head, two ways.)

-

*Which is entirely as an observer and not at all first hand so take it with some seasoning, particularly salt.

Darth Ember - your chest is your chest and what you put on it is obviously your own business. :-) But have you tried nursing bras? They're softer than sports bras and have no underwiring, but they provide more support than most non-underwired. They have a little catch at the shoulder so you can take a boob out at short notice, but you don't have to use that. My son's weaned, but I'm still wearing mine just because they're perfectly okay bras.

But that said, of course if you don't like wearing a bra, the simplest solution is not to wear one. :-)

The awkward bit is I know I need a bra; I don't feel comfortable being out of the house without one. (And almost all of mine have a bit of padding in front - not for size, but to prevent unwanted nippiness at odd chilly moments.) Your advice is interesting, too - mostly I go for whatever I can find.

It does make me unhappy though that a lot of the time there seems to be the assumption I'm just not doing it right. :( Like it's just I need to find the Bra Shop Holy Grail, and be fitted just right, and then any remaining problems are just me being silly. Which sucks.

I will say, anecdotally, to Dezipan that I am a woman who finds womens clothes uncomfortable and frustrating. I cannot wear bras without pain, and I do have a soft cloth one from Lane Bryant. They just.... don't work for me. So you're not alone.

(I wear spaghetti straps with shelf support under all my clothes to support my ample-but-not-as-ample-as-the-fat-industry-feels-I-should-be bosom.)

It's interesting how clothing is different in different areas. Last year, I wanted some professional button down shirts but they COULD NOT BE GOT in my area. Oh, they had them in the men's department, but the ladies wear all had ruffles on the sleeves and around the breast. Mom and I searched every shop in our urban area for months before giving up. I wanted to "dress like a man" at work, but I couldn't. Very frustrating. :(

It does make me unhappy though that a lot of the time there seems to be the assumption I'm just not doing it right. :( Like it's just I need to find the Bra Shop Holy Grail, and be fitted just right, and then any remaining problems are just me being silly. Which sucks.

I'm sorry if I implied this with my comment - I didn't intend to say that anyone who finds a bra uncomfortable is personally at fault for doing it wrong, but I probably chose my words poorly. The point I meant to make is that bras aren't, by design, intended to be uncomfortable or restricting - in theory, a good bra should be the opposite. However, I should have recognised that there are women out there for whom, through no fault of their own, this sadly isn't the case.

I'm not busty enough to require underwires, but otherwise that sounds pretty much like my experience trying non-sports bras. So I wear sports bras, which are more like wearing a tank top under one's shirt. (Which can be a little warm in the summer, since it's still an extra layer of fabric, but never tries to make a break for it.)

As an aside to Anna, I'm pretty sure bra burning is a myth. And even if I weren't, I'd look at it funny since one has to be pretty not endowed to find no bra more comfortable when being active. (Unless one replaces a bra with binding or some other breast restraint. ... And that sounds all kinds of wrong. Rogue breasts! Run!)

Ahhh. That makes a good deal more sense. Cross-cultural confusion then.

I'm not going to say there's never been anything like that in American culture, since women can be accepted as "one of the guys" but it's never been a whole cultural movement. And our fiction has pretty much just used that as an excuse to de-pretty someone and then have them prove they were a woman all along. Cue romance now that they're socially acceptably female look. Because romance with someone who isn't might be gay or something. *rolls eyes*

Wires often cross late at a night. And gender presentation is kind of a problematic thing for me to discus, since, well, I'm neither. Or both. Or something. I sometimes use the genderqueer label, but for a not insignificant number of people, that's an intentional thing, not a "sometimes I feel like a man, sometimes I feel like a woman, often I'm something else" thing, which confuses matters. I've always been dissatisfied with the portrayal of women in fiction because I do sometimes feel like a woman, and it's be nice to come across fictional women I relate to. I do sometimes. But very, very rarely.

Now, what's the difference between a female character who isn't feminine and one who's anti-feminine, because I'd say there's a difference. Some people, regardless of gender, are not going to be happy with all things feminine (or all things masculine). And in fantasy-medieval land, women's lots are pretty proscribed. If you don't want to marry someone and make babies (and possibly run a household), or, depending on the world, join a convent, you've run out of female-appropriate things to do. (Granted, I'd love it if more fantasy authors thought to throw in guys who rejected the male-appropriate things to do and wanted to raise kids and sew and what not. And not as joke characters.)

(Though knowing what people have said about the three fictions you've named as either being outright sexist or handling female characters in extremely problematic ways, I may have answered my own question.)

I'd love a world where wearing unadorned clothing wasn't "dressing like a man" and wearing adorned clothing wasn't "dressing like a woman." What if all clothing came cut for actual human beings (surely most women do not have extra short arms and torsos - or am I a mutant freak?) but in a variety of styles? That would be awesome. I mean, guys used to wear ruffles and frills. And makeup and jewelry for that matter. (At least the upper classes, and various different cultures.)

Would we lose anything if we didn't divvy clothing and work and behaviors into masculine and feminine and let people just be themselves? (Assuming, of course, that we didn't keep placing the same values on things. Everybody should be free to cry when they're sad, get dirty, love babies, get mad, care passionately about things, need help, be brave, be scared, be human without some of those things being seen as better than others.)

(Granted, I'd love it if more fantasy authors thought to throw in guys who rejected the male-appropriate things to do and wanted to raise kids and sew and what not. And not as joke characters.)

If I may, I would like to steal this for the fantasy novel in my head. If I ever get it out on paper, I want this character in it. :)

And, no, you are not body-unusual in the arm/torso department, or if you are, you can join me -- if I raise my arms, most women's shirts show my skin. Grr.

I have recently been informed by a friend that one reason why famous actors look SO DARN GOOD all the time, even when they're wearing "normal" clothes is that for many of them, those t-shirts and sweatpants are tailor made for their bodies. That makes a huge difference, it would seem.

In something I watched long enough ago that I don't really remember any of the context beyond what I'm about to say, there was a character who failed the manliness test and so his lot in life became being with women doing the sowing and the cooking and the general upkeep of the tribe while the men were off hunting. Then something went wrong with the hunt and the thing being hunted (a buffalo maybe?) ran right into the camp. He, having been trained as a hunter before he failed the test, was able to successfully drive off/kill the wild animal (I don't remember which) thus saving everyone.

This was counted as a passing of the manliness test, and so he was allowed to hunt. I'm pretty sure that his was in a sort of, "This is what we speculate prehistory was like," program. So the point wasn't actually the story or the characters or anything like that. Thus what I'm about to say is probably reading too much into it. (*checks top of page* ok, I'm good.)

I find myself wondering, what if he didn't want to hunt? I think he was pretty happy in his life with the women. The tribe clearly didn't think that one hunter more or less made that much of a difference, otherwise they would have said, "Screw the rite of passage, we need everyone who can hunt out there hunting." The only thing that I remember bothering him was the lack of respect that came from having failed his passage into manhood test, now that he had the respect it seems like a perfectly good happy ending for him would have been:

"You are now allowed to join the hunt.""That's nice, but I've got some sewing to do. You can hunt without me."

And have him return to his apparently happy life doing what the tribe considered women's work.

Chris, I love that idea so much. I mean, sewing is important too -- do they not want to be warm in winter?? :)

Since we're swapping stories, who here has played Quest for Glory (nee Hero's Quest) 2 & 3. There's a black woman in it named Uhura (yeah.) and she comes from a tribe where women can either be Warriors or Wives. She trained to be a Warrior, but everyone expected that when she married, she'd be a Wife and settle down.

Instead, she left the village, got a man, had a baby, and came back. Since no man there can claim her as Wife, she's both a Warrior and a mother. The game isn't perfect, like anything else, because it pushes the Primitive People, Primitive Rules idea, but I liked that as a kid because that was sort of the world I lived in anyway -- that you could have a career or a family but not BOTH.

So I wear sports bras, which are more like wearing a tank top under one's shirt.

...what do you think of when you think of sports bras? You seem like you're describing what I'd call an undershirt. I had some of those to get me used to the idea of wearing underwear on my torso when I hadn't gotten far enough into puberty to need a bra. Sports bras only go down just far enough to cover my third nipple. (It occurs to me that that description says more about me than about bras, but Wikipedia has some helpful pictures.)

I was, over ten years ago, rolling in my mind an idea/ setting for a graphic story wich featured beings from other dimension (or something) attaching themselves to people as parasytes. Others gave their hosts "light" properties and getting them declared saints (because extranormal stuff starting to happen in the medieval period, of course the church has to take some stand) and the other type would make their hosts into shadowy demon things. No two guesses which were the better ones. I didn't follow through because while settings come easily to me, plots don't.

On breasts and bras... I'm B/C-ish. That's what I get from a numbers only info - I've been not wearing a bra for 15 years or so. I don't experience any discomfort when moving, be it running or fencing. I've been told by some sad individuals that my boobs must be sagging to my knees by the time I'm 40, but that time is still 10 years ahead and I have seen no tendency towards that. I think that if breasts are reasonable sized, they will develope ligament tissue to support themselves given the chance. Of course not everyone's that lucky. I think the damn things are good for nothing for any non-private purpose, and a good deal more bother than use, and as long as they can hang in there I'm so not going to annoy myself with daily use of constricting item of clothing that serves no practical (to me) purpose. If I did wear anything it would be a binder, but those are doubly uncomfortable and just give me an uni-boob anyway. Sigh.

No, I mean the things in the pictures. But I don't really feel them when they're on, which I why I describe them as more shirt like. Nothing digs in anywhere like standard bras do, and even the chest elastic isn't so tight that you feel it. Or at least that I feel it. (Though I do sometimes go a step further and get away with wearing tight fitting tank tops without a bra at all, especially in the summer, since I'm sufficiently unendowed for a tight fitting tank top to keep things from bouncing.)

Anything's a significant amount of cloth if the weather's hot enough. I don't know where you live, but where I live, when the temperature gets high enough, every layer and every fold of those layers feels like it's too much.

Also, bras are often made of cotton or artificial fibres that are not geared towards comfort and wicking moisture from skin. (Mmmm, quick-dry men's boxer undies... short of going commando those are the best.) I wore a bra habitually until I was 15 or so and we went to a holiday in Corfu, Greece. It was uncomfortable as hell, and my mum was just "well take it of then" and I was "holy shit, that's an option too, why didn't I realize earlier" and never looked back.

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